Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid (2 page)

Picking my way through the sea of linen
drying in the back garden, I giggled to myself. I dodged past a pair of combis, ducked
under a pair of Mother’s wool stockings and nipped past an old clothesline
prop before landing at the back door. With a creak I pushed it open and, quiet as a
church mouse, tiptoed through the scullery and into a steaming hot kitchen.
Mother’s back was turned to me as she prodded the vast old copper that creaked
and groaned as it furiously boiled up a week’s worth of dirty washing.

I’d just made it to the stairs when a
voice piped up from the kitchen table.

‘Mollie’s
’ere, Mum.’

I whirled round to face my little brother,
James.

‘Hello, carrot,’ he
said, smiling smugly. ‘Happen you’re late. And you’ve got
twigs in your carrot top.’

‘Why, you little …’ I
gasped. If there was one thing I hated more than anything it was being called
‘carrot’. My face flushed as bright red as my curly hair.

Mother stared at me and, wiping the soapsuds
off her hands, she shook her head. ‘Oh, Mollie, bird’s-nesting … not
again. What’ll your father say?’

‘I’ll give ya a
fourpenny one so as I will!’ I yelled, making a lunge for my little
brother.

‘Oh, will you keep yer trap shut,
Mollie Browne?’ Mother sighed, flinging herself between us.

Two minutes later I was rewarded with a
second clip round the ear and sent to my bedroom with not so much as a skerrick of
bread. No matter. I didn’t care tuppence for a telling-off in them days.
I’d be the hero of the town.

Born Mollie Browne on 21 September 1916,
I’m now ninety-six years old, but my idyllic childhood is etched into my soul
and I remember it clear as yesterday.

We was poor growing up. Really poor.
I’m not talking not being able to afford to pay the bills or go on holidays.
I’m talking grinding poverty where every day for my poor parents was a
challenge to feed me and my brother James. We didn’t have a penny to our name,
see. But we never starved, not like the poor folk in the cities. Out in the countryside,
with an iron will and a healthy
disregard for the rules, you could
always find food for the table.

Money might have been scarce, but love,
laughter and adventures by the bucketload never were. And a childhood spent running free
in the beautiful Norfolk countryside gave me a spirit as wild as the hawthorns that grew
in the hedgerows.

Here’s me at the ripe
old age of ninety-six. My face may be wrinkled and my hair faded to silver, but I think
you can tell by the twinkle in my eye that I still find the fun in life.

I credit the fresh air, healthy
living of my childhood and ten years of back-breaking work in domestic service
for my good health. Do you know, I’ve not had a single
day’s illness in my life? I’ve outlived every single one of the
gentry that I scrubbed, shopped and cooked for all those years. Perhaps my childhood and
the poverty we experienced bred in me a will to survive. Or maybe it’s the
characters from whose loins I sprung.

If home is where the heart is then at the
heart of my home was my mother, Mabel. When she weren’t trying to belt me
round the head for getting into another scrape, she was a fiercely loyal, loving and
hard-working woman. I never saw my mother at rest. Ever. She was always working. Either
slaving away over an open fire, cooking, scrubbing the house or flushed with steam as
she spent a whole day washing, wringing clothes out through a giant mangle or wrestling
with a flat iron. If she wasn’t in the house she was working outside, tending
to the fruit and vegetables in the garden. The women of my mother’s generation
were grafters and tough as old boots too.

Mother met and fell in love with my father,
Sydney Easter Browne – so called because he was born on Easter Monday 1892.

I wasn’t even born when my father
went off to fight in the First World War in 1914. I was conceived when he came home on
leave. He was there at my birth in 1916 before he was packed off back to the trenches of
France, so I don’t remember much of him in the early years. When he was posted
back to France, Mother and I moved in with her mother, Granny Esther, in a small village
called Wereham, some five miles east of Downham Market.

They broke the mould when they made Granny
Esther. Five foot nothing with a fiery halo of thick auburn red
hair,
she was every bit as tough as the hobnail boots she wore. Granny was a familiar sight
around the village. She owned and ran the local village store and she stocked everything
from butter to paraffin, which she often served without washing her hands in between.
People didn’t give two hoots for health and safety in them days.

With a complexion like double cream, her
thick red hair and a proud face, she was a handsome woman and drew many an admiring
glance from the villagers as she trotted about the village on her horse and trap. She
must have been a beauty in her day. When she was seventeen her red hair and shapely
curves certainly caught the eye of the local squire’s son. The squire owned
half the lands and buildings in and around Wereham and so it seemed his son thought he
also owned the right to bed whichever local ladies took his roving eye.

The story of Granny Esther’s
illegitimate child was something of a local legend and I can’t remember a time
when I wasn’t aware of it.

She was seventeen when the
squire’s son got her pregnant and she gave birth to a little girl called Kate.
An illegitimate child in those days was a huge scandal. As she cradled the little baby
in her arms, even she was aware that keeping her wasn’t an option. The shame
her illicit liaison would have brought on her father’s house would have been
too much. And so she was forced to give her baby up.

Kate was raised by an aunt in a neighbouring
village, only coming home occasionally years later after Granny met and married my
grandfather, Wick, and had my mother and her brother, Cecil.

Ignorance and fear of pregnancy was everything
in them days and no doubt Granny Esther didn’t have the faintest clue what
went where. The squire’s son should have known better, but it was Granny who
earned the bad reputation, Granny’s family name that would have been
tarnished, Granny seen as the morally degenerate one, leading him astray with her wanton
behaviour. Load of old balderdash, of course, but such was the narrow-minded thinking of
the day.

How does it shape a woman, to be forced to
give up a child at seventeen? Did she weep long into the night, her arms aching to hold
her forbidden baby, her breasts gorged with unused milk? Her heart must surely have
hardened for I know she grew a brittle outer shell that meant we never really dared
question her or Kate on their forced separation.

As for the squire’s son with the
lusty loins and the roving eye? I’m pleased to say that he didn’t
get away with it scot-free. Granny’s father, my great-grandfather Pilgrim,
went round and horsewhipped that wretch. He deserved a sound thrashing.

Forced to grow up too soon, Granny Esther
developed a steely inner core, which meant she never suffered fools gladly.
‘Gerrorf wiv yer, yer old rascal,’ she’d cackle if someone
asked for something on tick, ‘or you’ll feel the toe of my
boot.’ And if any of the local farmhands dared come into her shop straight
from the farms without wiping their muddy feet? ‘Wipe ya dutty feet afore yew
come inta my clean scull’ry!’ she’d holler.

Granny could only see out of one eye, but I
swear that woman had eyes in the back of her head. She knew in a
flash
if someone was giving her cheek and if I dared to pull a face, thinking she
couldn’t see me, I’d soon know about it. But she could never stay
mad at me for long. For when it came to me, her granddaughter, she had a heart as soft
as butter. I was the apple of her eye and I knew it. I loved helping her in the shop,
especially when she let me sit on the counter, weigh out the sweets and take the
money.

Me as a baby being held by my
indomitable Granny Esther. I was always her favourite.

Wereham itself was a tiny little village.
The population was just a few hundred, but it had a bustling high street
that throbbed with life. The high street was the hub of the community and was lined
with countless businesses, many of which had been in the same family for generations.
Aside from Granny’s village shop, there was a butcher, a greengrocer, two
bakers, a market garden, a blacksmith and a post office. Can you imagine all those
shops? You’d struggle to get just one of those in a village high street these
days.

I loved wandering amongst the village
characters, taking in the noise, hustle and bustle of village life. Granny and Mother
never worried about me. What harm could come to me? There was just one car in the
village and apart from one odd sort who liked to slap young girls’ bottoms and
the occasional bit of horse rustling, crime was non-existent.

The smell of the bakers’ freshly
baked cottage loaves drifted up the street to the accompaniment of the fruiterer
shouting out the quality of his wares. Big fat sugared doughnuts from the bakery, oozing
with raspberry jam and thick with sugar, were my favourite.

There were pubs in the village, of course.
Three, in fact – the Crown, the George and Dragon, and the Nag’s Head – which
mostly served to shelter old boys nursing a pint of Norfolk Ale and hiding out from the
missus.

‘She’s always mobbun
about suffun,’ they’d grumble.

I always used to roam about on my own, right
from when I was a tiny nipper. When you’re little you’re invisible
to everyone. Most days I hung out by the Gospel tree, the biggest tree in the village,
and watched the world go by. I liked to stop here a bit because right behind it was a
big, grand house. Every day young lads
would hang out of the windows
and sing to me as I peered curiously up at them. Good-looking blond boys they were, who
sang in a funny accent that I recognized wasn’t a Norfolk one.

It wasn’t until two officers came
into Granny’s shop one day that I realized who they were.

‘Here you go, Esther, pigswill
from our prisoners of war,’ said one, a Mr Lucks. ‘Reckon your
pigs’ll love it.’

Turns out the big house in the village had
been commandeered by the army and housed German POWs.

‘Poor souls,’ muttered
Granny darkly. ‘No older than schoolboys, they ain’t.’

That was the only inkling I ever had that a
war was going on. Until, that is, it ended and finally, in 1920, Father returned. Thanks
to the war, he was a stranger to me. I don’t even remember his homecoming as
such. Just that he was not a well man and I was under strict instructions not to trouble
him.

I’d heard the muttered whispers in
darkened corridors between Granny and Mother, though.

‘He’s been gassed in
Ypres, Mum,’ my mother had sobbed. ‘His lungs’ll never be
the same.’

Ypres, or ‘Wipers’ to
the British troops, was under constant bombardment, and fighting between German and
British troops was continuous for four years. The conditions there sound nothing short
of hell. My father would have been packed cheek-by-jowl with his comrades in cold,
waterlogged trenches. Trench foot – rotting of the skin caused by fungal infection – was
common, as too were the millions of lice, which sucked off the rotting flesh of
soldiers. There was little by way of
sanitation, running water or hot
food. But the real horrors began when the Germans unleashed a new and shattering weapon
– poisonous gas. Gas as a silent enemy became more terrifying than the machine-gun fire
that usually followed it, as German infantry attacked the vulnerable gassed
soldiers.

Chlorine gas, which is heavier than air,
sank and settled in the trenches.

My father never breathed a word about how he
came to be gassed or what happened, but reading accounts of it later in life turned the
blood in my veins to ice. Many accounts talk of a greenish cloud seeping into the
trenches and of the soldiers choking and suffocating or running in all directions,
blinded. The gas only lasted short periods until it dissipated and troops quickly learnt
to use rags soaked in mud and water to breathe through, which absorbed the vapour. But
many soldiers found it hard to resist removing the cloths and tried to gulp in air as
they choked, which of course left them with no defence against the gas. Towards the end
of the war the Germans also unleashed mustard gas, which seeped into the soil, remaining
active for weeks and causing dreadful infections in burnt skin.